December 2009 Blog Posts (25)

Women cry, laugh and reminisce as they scribble their personal histories as immigrants onto loose-leaf paper in a Highland Park church basement during a writing workshop designed to help boost their creativity and self-esteem.

The participants – mostly Latinas from Highland Park and Highwood – spend hours discussing the stories in Spanish over cookies and coffee, then painstakingly edit and rewrite them. At the end of 10 weekly sessions, they’ll compile their favorite… Continue

Procter & Gamble has stepped up its efforts to reach Hispanic consumers in the US by creating versions of its top laundry detergent brands aimed specifically at recent Latin American immigrants in southern US states.

The initiative reflects a pledge by Bob McDonald, P&G's new chief executive, to increase the company's sales to Hispanic and African American consumers in the US as part of a global push to boost sales at the world's largest consumer goods company.

President Barack Obama is on track to name more Hispanics to top posts than any of his predecessors, drawing appointees from a wide range of the nation's Latino communities, including Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Dominicans and Colombians.

That won't necessarily give the president a free pass on issues such as immigration, but it may ease Hispanics' worries about whether Obama will continue reaching out to a group that was key to his winning the White House.

While Facebook is under fire for disclosing more data about its users to the public, Facebook is also touting that data about its users shows that they are increasingly diverse, with a racial and ethnic breakdown that nearly mirrors the overall diversity of the U.S. population, according to a blog entry posted on the social networking site on Wednesday.

While Facebook users in the U.S. were primarily white and Asian in the beginning… Continue

Latinos believe education and hard work are key to a successful future, but they are more likely than other young people to drop out of school and live in poverty, according to a new Pew Hispanic Center study being released today.

The study, based on a survey of more than 1,200 Latinos ages 16 to 25 and an analysis of census data, presents a portrait of the assimilation of a rapidly growing segment of the U.S. population, one that will have a significant effect on the nation's… Continue

Promising change after eight George Bush and Republican dominated years, Barack Obama won the most sweeping non-incumbent victory in over 50 years along with congressional Democrats gaining large House and Senate majorities. In addition, at 56.8%, voter turnout was the highest since Richard Nixon's "secret plan" to end the Vietnam war and his "Southern" and "law and order" strategies beat Hubert Humphrey and independent George Wallace in 1968.
On… Continue

In rural, conservative Tulare County, Democratic Party activist Ruben Macareno has one wish after the recent skirmish to pick California's new Assembly speaker.

"I hope the struggle is over, and it was an amicable one," Macareno said.

He's worried that a bad aftertaste from the contest – which had a Latino vying against a Latino – could spoil his mission to galvanize Latino voters in a region where they're underrepresented… Continue

One Florida, which removed race and ethnicity from college admissions' outreach, was a monumental step for Florida a decade ago. There was palpable -- and understandable -- mistrust by African Americans who feared they would lose ground at state universities.

The numbers of black, Hispanic and Asian students at Florida's 11 state-run universities tell an optimistic story a decade later, but there's still work to do.

If Jesse Jackson is mad at Barack Obama, the president must be doing something right. Jackson complained this week that President Obama wasn’t doing enough to help blacks in a recession that has disproportionately affected black workers. Jackson’s major beef, however, seems to be that he was not invited to the White House job summit earlier this month. Join the crowd.

The White House didn’t invite anyone from the Chamber of Commerce or the National Federation of Independent… Continue

A national task force commissioned by the University of Notre Dame launched a campaign Dec. 12 that seeks to enroll 1 million Hispanic students in Catholic schools by 2020.

The Catholic School Advantage campaign comes out of a 65-page report the task force released the same day: "To Nurture the Soul of a Nation: Latino Families, Catholic Schools and Educational Opportunity."

Dec. 12 also was the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe, the patroness of the Americas, to whom… Continue

Tossing another hot potato on the 2010 congressional schedule, top Hispanic Democrats outlined Tuesday a major immigration-reform proposal that is more generous to illegal immigrants than the last two bills that failed to make it into law in the past three years.

Backers of overhauling the nation's immigration laws have concluded that, having failed to win support from businesses and immigration-enforcement advocates in the past, they would write a new bill without any… Continue

A poster showing Mary and Joseph heading to Bethlehem for a census and the birth of Jesus is raising eyebrows among some evangelicals, who consider it an inappropriate use of Christian symbolism for the headcount the government will conduct next year.

The posters, created by the National Association of Latino Elected Officials (NALEO), have been distributed to more than 7,000 churches in an effort to raise awareness of the census among… Continue

Amid mounting criticism that minorities, women and low-income workers are missing out on business opportunities and jobs under the stimulus bill, the Obama administration is urging the nation's governors to work harder to ensure that these groups participate fully in state transportation projects that receive federal funding.

The issue of equity has cast a cloud over the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act in recent weeks as various reports appear to confirm what minority… Continue

What are you doing? We need visions, hope, faith and most of all is Love. After having a heart attack 6 years ago, I learn that the human touch is one of the powerful healing thing in life. We all are suffering from the state of which this country is in, but VISIONS OF, HOPE, FAITH AND LOVE...IS THE NEW BEGINNING. On… Continue

Arlington school trustees rejected a 2010-11 school calendar Thursday night that would have made the district the first in the area to honor labor leader César Chávez with a day off for staff members and students.

In objecting to the proposal, some trustees said the holiday would cost too much instruction time a week before state math tests and just after the district’s planned spring break, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported in today’s editions.

The New York City Health Department recently released its list of most popular names of 2008 - at last - with some pretty interesting results. (It reminded me of the old "Jennifer & Jason" days - before the Social Security Administration was compiling a national list, when Pam and I used to have to contact - and sometimes plead with - the Health Departments of all 50 states for their figures and laboriously construct our own master list - and I recall that New York state and city were… Continue

Florida's high school graduation rate jumped by 3 percent points to a record 76.3 percent this year, state education officials said Friday, but a critic said the state is still a "dropout factory."

Officials credited the improvement largely to minority students. The rate for blacks increased 4.1 percentage points to 64.9 percent. The rate for Hispanics grew by 4.5 percentage points to 72.1 percent. Those increases compare to a 2.3 percentage point gain for non-Hispanic whites to 83.1… Continue